Friday, February 10, 2012
Subtle ripplings
I am noticing a somewhat painful physical/emotional reaction to small physical movements, such as moving my mouse wheel or keyboarding. It's initially felt as a tingling in the fingers. With mindfulness, a fraction of a second later I feel a kind of longing rippling through the right torso.
Friday, February 3, 2012
Anicca
Anicca is the Pali term for "impermanence" or "inconstancy".
In recent days I've noticed an increasing sense of bodily inertia, especially during meditation. During meditation, I just don't want to move my body at all -- don't want to move my arm to check the time on my phone, don't want to lift my head to improve my posture. A couple of nights ago I realized the reason: each bodily movement is now accompanied by pain. The pain is not located in the part being moved, but in the torso, and it is akin to sadness.
Describing this to Eric after dinner last night, it occurred to me that this might be the sadness of loss -- of realizing, with each tiny movement, the impermanence of things. The sadness of saying good-bye to one bodily position as I move onto the next. The sadness appears at the tiniest movement, even at the moment I tense my muscle in preparation for movement. In other words, the inertia might be an insight into anicca.
Last night I awoke around 3 and sat up to meditate for 90 minutes. I chose to experiment with this phenomenon. When I noticed my posture was slumped, I very very slowly exerted myself to sit up straight, paying close attention to the sensations of sadness in the chest. Following Daniel Ingram's suggestion on the Dharma Overground website in response to my description of my practice, I paid special attention to the vibrational quality of the sadness. Although the sadness was uncomfortable, it was also a relief to look directly at it.
As I became more and more aware of the sadness, I wanted to let go of it. At one point, amidst this desire to let go, I felt heat gather in the chest, and over a period of perhaps 20 seconds, I felt some of this sadness drop away. This was accompanied by a letting go of my monitoring, journaling mind.
I moved into a state that felt like nothingness but which I imagined was not actually nothingness but just the unfamiliar absence of my usual monitoring, journaling mind. I had been feeling this monitoring mind (which seems about the same as "the chattering mind" and "the mind that wants to be special") as a burden that I've increasingly wanted to drop, and I've been seeing it intellectually as something that must be keeping me from being fully present. The monitoring mind kept wanting to re-activate, so I shifted my attention to the urge to re-activate. This was interesting and satisfying. The state that I describe as nothingness only appeared intermittently and for very brief (1-2 seconds) periods of time.
In recent days I've noticed an increasing sense of bodily inertia, especially during meditation. During meditation, I just don't want to move my body at all -- don't want to move my arm to check the time on my phone, don't want to lift my head to improve my posture. A couple of nights ago I realized the reason: each bodily movement is now accompanied by pain. The pain is not located in the part being moved, but in the torso, and it is akin to sadness.
Describing this to Eric after dinner last night, it occurred to me that this might be the sadness of loss -- of realizing, with each tiny movement, the impermanence of things. The sadness of saying good-bye to one bodily position as I move onto the next. The sadness appears at the tiniest movement, even at the moment I tense my muscle in preparation for movement. In other words, the inertia might be an insight into anicca.
Last night I awoke around 3 and sat up to meditate for 90 minutes. I chose to experiment with this phenomenon. When I noticed my posture was slumped, I very very slowly exerted myself to sit up straight, paying close attention to the sensations of sadness in the chest. Following Daniel Ingram's suggestion on the Dharma Overground website in response to my description of my practice, I paid special attention to the vibrational quality of the sadness. Although the sadness was uncomfortable, it was also a relief to look directly at it.
As I became more and more aware of the sadness, I wanted to let go of it. At one point, amidst this desire to let go, I felt heat gather in the chest, and over a period of perhaps 20 seconds, I felt some of this sadness drop away. This was accompanied by a letting go of my monitoring, journaling mind.
I moved into a state that felt like nothingness but which I imagined was not actually nothingness but just the unfamiliar absence of my usual monitoring, journaling mind. I had been feeling this monitoring mind (which seems about the same as "the chattering mind" and "the mind that wants to be special") as a burden that I've increasingly wanted to drop, and I've been seeing it intellectually as something that must be keeping me from being fully present. The monitoring mind kept wanting to re-activate, so I shifted my attention to the urge to re-activate. This was interesting and satisfying. The state that I describe as nothingness only appeared intermittently and for very brief (1-2 seconds) periods of time.
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